L3 reading: The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative Malm and Hornborg (2014) This article emphasises that humanity as a species are not responsible for what we consider the anthropocene ... a small minority are Abstract The Anthropocene narrative portrays humanity as a species ascending to power over the rest of the Earth System. In the crucial field of climate change, this entails the attribution of fossil fuel combustion to properties acquired during human evolution, notably the ability to manipulate fire. But the fossil economy was not created nor is it upheld by humankind in general. This intervention questions the use of the species category in the Anthropocene narrative and argues that it is analytically flawed, as well as inimical to action. Intra-species inequalities are part and parcel of the current ecological crisis and cannot be ignored in attempts to understand it · The currently unfolding discourse on the Anthropocene represents a convergence of Earth System natural science and post-Cartesian social science as represented, for instance, by Bruno Latour (who i've read) . . Now that humanity is recognised as a geological force, the story goes, we must reconceptualize not only the relations between natural and social sciences but also history, modernity and the very idea of the human . The question we wish to address in this brief intervention is whether this should really prompt us to abandon the fundamental concerns of social science, which importantly include the theorization of culture and power . We shall suggest that the physical mixing of nature and society does not warrant the abandonment of their analytical distinction . We find it deeply paradoxical and disturbing that the growing acknowledgement of the impact of societal forces on the biosphere should be couched in terms of a narrative so completely dominated by natural science . If the dynamics [of human nature's transition to fossil fuels] were of a more contingent character, the narrative of an entire species - the anthropos as such - ascending to biospheric supremacy would be difficult to uphold: 'the geology of mankind' must have its roots in the properties of that being. Anything less would make it a geology of some smaller entity, perhaps some subset of Homo sapiens . . Concerning our learned manipulation of fire: Here was 'the essential evolutionary trigger for the Anthropocene', in the words of Rapuach and Canadell: fossil fuel combustion is a result of the fact that 'long before the industrial era, a particular primate species learned how to tap the energy reserves stored in detrital carbon' . A scrutiny of the transition to fossil fuels in 19th-century Britain, however, reveals the extent to which the historical origins of anthropogenic climate change were predicated on highly inequitable global processes from the start · Steam engines were not adopted by some natural-born deputies of the human species: by the nature of the social order of things, they could only be installed by the owners of the means of production . A clique